Hey guys, so this is a continuation of my SAT series. If you’re new here, I’m Anna
and I somehow scored a perfect 1600 on my SAT a few months ago, so now I’m trying
to get all my tips out there for people to help them on their SAT journeys.
So let’s talk about the math sections...they’re arguably more straight forward than the reading
and writing, but require more background knowledge on both algebra and a few geometry concepts.
I’m not the best person to speak on quick, vast improvements in knowledge of the foundational
math concepts, but I can talk about preventing careless mistakes and refining and polishing
your score if you’re nearly at your goal, since I have personal experience with that.
In the future I can try to make videos on building up that foundation for those of you
who are looking to improve by hundreds of points, but for now I’m just going to recommend
doing lots of questions with Khan Academy’s SAT practice because it’s free, online,
easily accessible, and it does a pretty good job. I think this video can still be useful
to anyone though--so stay tuned.
In studying for these sections, whether you’re on Khan academy or taking practice tests,
it’s essential to write down each mistake you’re making and how you’ll avoid making
it in the future. To do this properly, you first need to categorize your mistakes. There
are two, or maybe three main types of mistakes when it comes to SAT math. There’s the careless
mistakes, the ones slightly more rooted in not understanding the problem, and the deep-rooted
issues. It’s important to identify which each mistake is after you make it, since this
will give you a better understanding of if you have to master the concepts a bit more,
or if you’ve already got a good grasp on things and just need to work on time management
or checking your work better. This is my notebook from when I was at the peak of my studying.
First we have my Khan Academy mistakes with blue lines as careless and orange as a comprehension
issue. Be sure to write down a little bit of the question to give context, the answer
you put down, and the correct answer. I also made sure to write down any formulas I might
have forgotten that would lead to shortcuts in solving the problems or that were essential
in solving them, along with the step-by-step process for some of them. For the careless
mistakes, try to be as specific as you can on where you went wrong. Like this is more
helpful than this. Once you do this, you’ll have a reference you can look back on to refresh
yourself where you’re going wrong before test day, and you’ll have a review of all
of the formulas you need right there. Notice I did this for practically every SAT related
thing I did...the PSAT 10, any daily Khan Academy practice, college board practice tests,
and later prepscholar when I started using that. Later I moved this all to a spreadsheet
which worked just as well. As you can see, I had a lot of fun with my advice column for
some of these, especially the careless ones. Again, some of this advice from my past self
is more helpful than others. But hey, as silly as I was some of the time, I was able to notice
some of my recurring mistakes really easily this way, or at least get a better sense of
the topics I was commonly making mistakes on. And, for the problems that are really
challenging, rephrasing the answers and explanations given to you by whatever resource you’re
using helps one thousand percent more than just reading them over. It’s the deep comprehension
that will really help. Try getting together with some friends to go over your mistakes,
or explaining problems you got wrong to your parents, siblings, cats, etc... because forcing
yourself to teach it to somebody else will make sure that you know it enough yourself
first.
So you may be wondering what my most common mistakes were and some ways to prevent that.
Again, this is going to vary based on where you’re scoring and just vary person-to-person,
but there are some key things to avoid. First, please read through the whole problem
before you try to answer it. You don’t know how many times I got over excited and rushed
through solving a problem, just to realize later that I solved for the right variable
or didn’t round to the nearest tenth or something. The SAT tries to trick you...like
here it says what’s the X-value of this minimum of this graph. If you’re not reading
carefully and put down negative two, that’s killer, even though this problem is on the
easier side. Also read all the answer choices, because sometimes this can help prevent a
careless mistake. All math SAT answer choices usually look pretty similar to each other
with a few differences that make them unique, so if you’re not paying attention and don’t
read down the whole list, you might select the wrong one. Pay careful attention to phrases
like did vs did not, or especially in these table questions when they ask you probability,
double check you’re working with the right numbers.
There are some questions that are super wack where there are technically two right answers,
but only one of them is in the format that the question specifically looks for. Like
this one wants the equation of this graph that will specifically give you the vertex,
which is the vertex form--not just the zeros or x-intercepts. These questions suckkk, so
you have to make sure you watch out for them and don’t fall into their trap.
Also, guesstimation is your friend, especially on the non-calculator section where you might
be short on time or not be able to do an in-depth calculation for every single problem. This
works really well with the geometry and angle problems, since although they’re not drawn
to scale, you can usually eliminate a couple of outlier answers. And also graphs..I mean
look at this graph (so sorry for the very dead vine reference here…) it asks what
the equation of the line is that passes through B and D. Well without using any fancy equations
to solve for this, we know it’s negative and fairly steep, eliminating anything with
-⅓ compared to -3. We also know it passes through a value of about 4 for its y-intercept,
which means it can’t be this one. Just a little double check by distributing and we
see that it has to be B. You shouldn’t solely rely on this logic, since it can backfire,
but definitely use it as a tool to double-check answers and prevent selecting one that’s
unreasonable. Even the real life ones...we know this boy is probably not growing 14.3
inches a year between the ages of 2 and 5. The SAT usually sticks to real-life logic
for these types of problems, so double check if you find yourself selecting any outrageous
answers. And, here’s some mistake I made on a graph on coffee cooling--sorry I don’t
have more context for this. I forgot that coffee doesn’t keep cooling forever...it’ll
eventually just reach room temperature, so the correct graph of temperature over time
should have a horizontal asymptote at room temperature where it stops, and even if I
might not have understood the broader question in its entirety I should have figured that
out. For most of these questions, especially when
you have your calculator on the calculator section, you can just plug in all the answer
choices to the problem, use this guesstimation logic, and get away with not even having to
solve some of them. Now, you’ll probably run out of time if you try to do this for
every single question, but if you’ve spent more than a minute on a question and still
don’t know what’s going on, it’s a good second strategy.
Now to those of you who have all the cool calculator apps and can get away with like
not solving any problem on the calculator section and just plugging it all in, like
good for you. I applaud you. But for the less technologically inclined, like myself, I still
have some tips that are useful. First, the most important thing to know besides
your basic four functions and whatever, is how to graph. If you’re ever struggling
excessively with a problem with a graph, it might be faster for you to just graph all
four of the answer choices like this. Some key things to know how to do when you hit
the graph tab are find where it’s intersecting the x-axis, y-axis, another graph, or where
its max and min values are. You can do all of this by going to 2nd calc. You can always
create a horizontal line anywhere by setting another graph with y= whatever the number
is that you want. By finding the intersection between that horizontal line and your function,
that can help you solve not just the graphing problems, but also some of the polynomials
and things. Don’t abuse this power though, since usually it's easier and faster to solve
these in other ways. The last main calculator trick is the best
one..if you go to apps, plysmlt2, and polynomial root finder, at least on a TI-84, you can
solve for any quadratic function, cubic function, etc. It lets you plug in the coefficients
in this tab, and it’ll give you the roots back. You can hit 2nd quit a whole bunch to
exit out of this btw. No more quadratic formula ever again! Unless it’s on the non-calculator
section of course. But this helps speed things up a lot or at the very least gives you some
ways of double checking. So with all these strategies, I still found
myself making careless mistake after careless mistake, but I finally started doing this
little ritual that seemed to help me out a lot, and even helped me correct one of my
wrong answers on the 1600 SAT. Here’s the strategy:
There are gonna be some problems that you do super fast and are really confident in.
Instead of moving onto the next question right after those, make sure you plug the answer
choice back into the problem, check to make sure you’ve solved for the right thing,
rounded properly, and make sure there’s absolutely no way you could have screwed up
anywhere. It’ll help if you get acquainted with the most common careless mistakes you’re
making with that mistakes spreadsheet you’re definitely keeping. Once you’re ABSOLUTELY
confident, put a checkmark by that question and just forget about it. This little check
only takes a few seconds, but slowing down and doing a little bit of reflection helps
prevent the catastrophe of making a super dumb mistake.
Now, the second level of questions are the blanks. These are for any problem that has
an excessive number of steps in it or challenged you even a little bit. Sometimes if you’re
a bit challenged by a problem, you could be making a simpler mistake because you’re
so focused on getting the harder part of it right. Anything that’s challenging like
this doesn’t get an automatic check, and only after you’re done with the whole section
do you go back and check each one. Giving your brain time to work on other problems
will make it easier for you to catch mistakes when you come back to them later. Blanks should
account for anything between 10-20 questions in a section, so quite a fair number.
The final level is the star. This is reserved for questions that you’ve worked on for
a minute or so and see no solution. The ones you’re really struggling with, consistently
getting an answer choice that isn’t there, or the ones that make your brain automatically
shut off just by looking at them. Mark a star and don’t waste too much time pondering
over these, since what usually happens is that once you take a break and get a fresh
perspective, those stars become a lot easier. Once you finish the first runthrough of the
section, go back to the blanks and double check them all, marking them with the check
when you do. This should at least give you a confidence boost, or make you feel really
relieved if you correct a wrong answer somewhere during the process. Now go back to the stars
and try your best. If you’re aiming for a perfect 800, it’s good to get the number
of starred questions down to between 1-3 and ultimately be able to solve all of them confidently
with that little bit of extra time in the end. If you’re not aiming for perfection,
you now know you’ve gotten pretty darn close and are confident in the majority of the questions,
which is much better than not knowing where to direct your double-checking energy, or
spending too much time on the hardest questions in the section.
I realize the biggest issue with this strategy is time, so if you don’t have enough time
at the end to do all this, you should work on recognizing the strategy you need to use
to solve a problem, getting faster at the actual calculations, and using some special
tricks here and there to shave off some of your time.
Actually I used to just kind of sit there and take a little break once I *thought* I
was done checking, but never under any circumstance should you do this unless every single problem
has a little check by it and you’ve double checked to make sure all of your bubbles on
the bubble sheet are correct. Side note: this isn’t specific for math,
but personally I like to fill in all the bubbles at the end. If you do it as you go it kinda
gets you out of the zone when you’re switching back and forth between them, and sometimes
I would just spend way too long on it. The only thing is you gotta make sure you don’t
run out of time. So maybe 3 or 4 minutes from the end, no matter where you are in the section,
fill in all the bubbles you have at once as quickly as your hand can move.
Ok I think that’s all my tips for the math section! Let me know if you have any other
questions and I’ll try to answer them in the comments, and also put any helpful tips
of your own in the comments to help ppl out. I hope this was helpful, and you can watch
the other parts of my series here if you want to. byE!